Rambling in My Blue Plaid Shoes

Slept in this morning because I was still hurting pretty badly in my lower back, but it's better than yesterday and I found a way to lay that did not produce pain until I tried to move or get out of bed. Still, that was better than the day before. Not sure what I did to get this pain, but I sure don't want to do it again. Changing my chair in front of the computer seemed to make a vast improvement and sitting while weeding worked too...hence the raised bed ideas seem better and better.

Yesterday I put on my blue plaid slip-on shoes and because they are a bit bizarre, I wore them out socializing. When you wear them with jeans they don't show as much and don't make as big of an impact on someone else's psyche, but I had them on nonetheless. They are so very comfortable that I'm wearing them again today, with my slightly different colored blue-green plaid shirt. The kind that buttons down the front, has short sleeves and feels like there's not much for fabric in them. Great on a warm breezy day – like today.

So, I found my blue plaid shoes at the local department store. I found them in the boys section and they were $4.99. SOLD! I was looking for some flats to wear to work but could not find any suitable ones that looked comfy and plain. Comfort was and is the big issue. I'm short and flats don't do anything for me except allow me to not have to think about my painful ankles or the blisters from those fancy shmansy stilettos that I wore for the meeting last week. I'm a flats person all the way except when I have the opportunity to wear sandals or go barefoot and barefoot is my shoe of choice. When I walk down the gravel road to our mailbox I sometimes envision myself barefoot, with a piece of grass hanging out of my mouth, a bit of a breeze blowing through my long curls, just as relaxed as a person could ever be without sleeping.

I think I looked that way at one point in my life. I remember a lot of days when my best friend Dawn and I would be walking down the blacktop road that led to town from my house. She was usually on my green and white Schwinn bike and I'd walk beside her. She veered all over the road so that I could keep up with her but we were in no hurry, nowhere that we actually had to be. I'd pull out a shaft of grass from some growing alongside the road, check it over for bugs, then chew on the end. It would be lightly sweet. We'd be off adventuring later, but that was how we usually started out on those long summer days.

Writing about these things, brings those pictures up in my mind. Sometimes so very clearly that I can smell the hot tarmac and feel it move and ooze between my toes, leaving my footprints on the long black path. I wonder sometimes are my footprints are still there? One here, one there? Small impressions of a very small foot. Large impressions left in a very young mind.

It's amazing what can trigger these bits and pieces of a person's past. What you remember and what actually happened – well there's no pictures other than what's in your head that can prove the truth. However, I would not question their validity. What would be the point? When I hear a bumblebee buzz past, I can bring up memories of fields of daisies. When I look up into a blue sky dotted with horsetail clouds, I can bring up memories of laying out in the hay field looking up at those clouds and daydreaming. Pleasant things, things of wonder.

They say that as you get up in the years, your memories become larger, take up more of your life and become more important. I'm not so sure that is true. As we get older, we may become more sedentary and have more time for remembering, but I don't think that the memories grow or change much. You just become more practiced at bringing them up in your head.

As I finish writing this tidbit, I look again at my blue plaid shoes and smile. One day they will be a memory that I can bring back up. What will I remember about them?

A Moment of Silence

Image by peasap via Flickr

Our small piece of property is bordered on the north and the east by two state highways and on the north again by the east/west lines of the railroad. All three are quite busy most of the time so it's seldom what you would call quiet around here. There are moments though. They are rare indeed, but I see a few from time to time.

I am a very quiet person. I don't slam doors, I don't clomp around in big boots, I don't talk in a loud voice and I don't have a need to turn on a tellie or a radio just for some noise. I know every creaking board in the house, every squeaking door, and I know how to move on and around them so they won't chirp.

So this morning, like most mornings, I got my cup of coffee, the dog and the cat and started out for the south deck to sit with the early morning sunshine, being careful to not arouse anything that is sleeping. As I started to slide the patio door back, I had to pause. I instantly knew that something was very different this morning. So I quietly let out the dog and the cat and gently stepped out onto the deck.

No car sounds, no approaching trains, no neighbors dog barking, but what was so different was that the birds in my yard and in the nearby neighbors properties, had all stopped talking. The world appeared to have stopped. I wondered - What is it doing? Is it re-adjusting, am I in another plane of existence? But as thinking then became loud, I ceased the mind chatter and just sat, quietly and deeply breathing the fresh morning air.

The air smells different, the colors appear more vibrant. In the distant cornfield I hear the frog-like warbling of a sandhill crane. A bumblebee cruises past, legs heavy with treasure. A light breeze ruffles its way through the nearby maple. The morning doves gently coo to each other out on our gravel road. The small sounds like those are there, in the background, but now they are muted, blended into the silence. Just singular notes on a song of peacefulness. That song playing in my head and in my heart.

I observe that I am not the only one that has noticed the quiet. The dog lays at the top of the steps on the deck, gazing out into the distance, ears up, head up, completely alert. The cat has draped herself over the corner of the table next to me. She turns her head and looks me straight in the eyes. I think I detect a smile there and so I smile back. She winks. It seems like eternity has folded itself up into the dew on my chair arm and has come to sit with us on the deck to enjoy the beauty of the morning. I take it all in, like a painting on a canvas.

Suddenly the peace is broken! A hummingbird, its wings buzzing like a swarm of angry bees, has come to check us out, and with that, a chorus of birds erupts! I hear the distant sound of a train approaching, the whistle warning and the low rumble of its great churning engines. A car approaches from the south and the neighbor's dog begins to bay. Thier rooster sounds the morning alarm. The Day has begun.

Was what I just didn't hear real? Truthfully, does it really matter? I think not. What matters is that I was part of it and felt it and now I am more alive because of it. I stretch, take the last drink of my coffee and...

step out into the new day.

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The Year of No Gardening : Planting just a few things.

Image via Wikipedia

I transferred this blog from an older blog. It is dated: May 9, 2010

Today was a very good day to be out in the garden. Two days of cold and snowy weather to open to a warm and sunny day. And it's Mother's Day.

I did some chores around the yard and then walked around to check on what the snow and frost had done to my tender plants and my orchard. Happy to say - not much. The walk took me into my vegetable garden - one of the three that I'm not planting. The beds that my daughter had prepped were starting to take on weeds so I got out my garden spade and trowel and loosened up the soil, pulled weeds and flattened out the beds. She had planted glads along the trellis's, spinach along one side of one bed and some pole beans. Those beans that had been planted did get froze out, so those came out with the weeds.

I looked the garden over and thought, well I do have some glad bulbs left; some of the large bulbs that would produce flowers this year and the small corms that needed a bed to go into so that they could produce the larger bulbs in a year or so. So, I planted some extra bulbs in with those that April had planted, making the row wider and then where there had been a bed of red cabbage in amongst the oregano last year, I worked in the hundreds of young corms that came off the larger bulbs. Some will grow, some will not. I can toss some summer savory in with the shoots a bit later this spring.

I happened to glance over my shoulder and saw how tall the garlic that I had planted was getting - the garlic that would be producing large bulb heads and the young garlic that had been planted from the seed heads of last year's garlic. There are...thousands of those...so I pulled up a small handfull and trenched them in next to the spinach that April had planted. An experiment to see how big the set will get. Those infant sets will be used to plant next year's garlic sets in a much bigger bed out in the far garden when I get that bed ready later this summer. It will consist of two parts, the production bed and the youth bed. So in two years I should have a very healthy bed full of garlic and sets ready for the following year.

Looking at the spinach I thought well, a good salad with spinach needs some good fresh lettuce so I gathered some of my seeds from last year and planted a mirror row of the spinach, half with Paris Island Romaine and the other half with Green Nevada Batavia Lettuce. I glanced at the spinach and wondered - has it been two weeks since this has been planted? Yes it has. So I scoped out another bed that my daughter had prepped half of and thought that would be a good place for a second planting of spinach. Looking at that bed I remembered that I had 1 dozen broccoli plants in the house ready for planting, so I got those, put them into the next bed, west of the trellis, placed 3-4 Kentucky Wonder Pole bean seeds between each plant and trenched the bed in front of all that for the spinach. That planted, I went back through my box of seeds, thinking, what a waste that I won't be using up some of this seed. I have a lot left over from last year. I found what was a half of a package of Little Marvel peas and said ah what the heck. Those went in along the trellis, behind where I planted the young glad corms.

I cleaned out the wooden barrel on the corner of the garden. Some irises are coming up in there. The sage that I placed in there did not make it through the winter so I pulled out the corpses and placed two flat-leafed Italian Parsley plants in there and then transferred my Italian (or is it Greek) oregano to there also to spill over the sides of the barrel. Below the barrel is where my black eyed susans are and this year I had several babies, so I cut out some of those and placed them in between the narcissus that grows at the ends of the asparagus bed.

It was time to go back in the house. On my way in I thought - oh shucks, I forgot to put in the onion sets. There's always room for onions and well, even if I don't plant a garden this year, at least I'll have them.

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